Society and Community Linguistics research strand at the Bristol Centre for Linguistics (BCL)

Dr Grant Howie is conducting research on the spread of non-regional pronunciation (NRP) British English and its influence on the loss of regional dialectal features in the South West of England. This project employs a verbal guise method to investigate whether younger speakers are still able to differentiate between regional dialects and identify key dialectal markers, or if the younger generations are losing both production and perception of these features.

Professor Jonathan Charteris-Black has pioneered an approach to our understanding of metaphors called Critical Metaphor Analysis. The method has been followed by several scholars in the field. In his own work, he has applied the approach to political language (and see more in Critical Linguistics), narratives of illness, and religious discourse in his monograph, Fire Metaphors: Discourses of Awe and Authority.

Dr Mark Nartey continues to examine language use that serves emancipatory purposes by taking a social justice approach. This work highlights how members of non-dominant and marginalized (disempowered) groups sculpt a positive image for themselves, engage in solidarity formation for group empowerment and reconstruct their experiences in a manner that gives them voice, agency and a positive identity.

This work has resulted in several publications, including an edited volume titled Voice, agency and resistance: Emancipatory discourses in action. Nartey’s current work on emancipatory discourses investigates the language of female political leaders from the Global South to illustrate how their language functions as an empowering artifact and an inspiring resource.

Dr Mark Nartey has extensively explored the relationship between discourse, ideology and mythology in political and media discourse.  The findings of his work have been published in his monograph titled Political myth-making, nationalist resistance and populist performance and in several journals in media and communication studies. Nartey has examined political myths such as Unite or Perish, the Conspiratorial Enemy, the Noble Revolutionary, the Valiant Leader and the Messiah. His work on myths, moral stories and narratives in the media illustrates how daily news content can be used to tell eternal stories.

From the standpoint that speakers have a human right to be able to learn and speak their native/family language, Dr Grant Howie and Dr Kate Steel are interested in how the Irish Language has been perceived and used by both sides of the political divide in Northern Ireland, from the Troubles until present. The project investigates how reference to any fields of metaphor, and their use, has evolved over this time. 

The decision to summon the police in an emergency can prove pivotal for a victim of domestic abuse, depending on the quality of the police response. This ongoing research project by Dr Kate Steel draws from police body-worn video footage to explore interactions between attending officers and reported victims during first response call-outs to the scene of domestic abuse incidents. This is the first study of communication in this context to analyse authentic speech data. Of primary concern are police questioning strategies, rapport-building, the assignment of responsibility, and the interactional management of space.

Even though hesitation (e.g. filled pauses such as um and uh) are a normal part of language, we know that hesitation in police interviews / court appearances make the listeners perceive the speaker (e.g. witness, suspect) as not being truthful. With Dr Felicity Deamer (Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics) and Dr Lucia Busso (Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics), Dr Minna Kirjavainen-Morgan is investigating the impact of police interviewers’ filled pause use on the witnesses/suspects’ subsequent filled pause use.

Dr Minna Kirjavainen-Morgan, Dr Grant Howie and Dr Luke Rudge  are investigating if different non-native speaker groups’ grammatical and/or lexical errors are judged differently in comparison to each other and to a native English speaker group, and if these differences are influenced by informal and formal contexts. This will give us an insight into whether the speaker’s expected language level affects the level with which the hearer perceives the speaker’s language proficiency.

Dr Charlotte Selleck continues her work on the Sociolinguistics of Wales by addressing the precarious situation for modern foreign languages (MFL) in Wales today. The ethnographic research seeks to understand and unpack the complex relationship between Welsh and MFL.

Dr Charlotte Selleck works with Bristol’s Somali community to explore questions around language policy, both at home and at a local level. She has considered the choices families make around which language to use in the home and the pressures which parents and children come under when it comes to deciding whether to speak Somali or English. She is currently working with Dr Rona Lockyer-Sheppard on an interdisciplinary project that explores British-Somali experiences of fatherhood.